CIP Canadian Wind & Hydro, Riverstone Sells Stake in Pattern

This week on News Flash, Grenergy is selling 23 percent of its Oasis de Atacama project for up to $962M, a consortium led by APG Asset Management NV and Australian Retirement Trust will acquire Riverstone Holdings LLC equity stake in Pattern Energy, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has acquired a majority stake in Toqlukuti’k Wind and Hydrogen.

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Allen Hall: Alright, first up, Grenergy is selling 23 percent of its Oasis del Atacama project. To CONT Global A KKR company for up to $962 million. The sale includes three of the seven phases of what would be the world’s largest energy storage facility, compromising 451 megawatts of solar and two and a half gigawatt hours of storage capacity.

The three phases are already under construction and will generate more than 1.3 terawatt hours of energy annually. Now, Phil, why is Grinergy removing itself from some of these projects? Is it cash constriction?

Philip Totaro: This one’s kind of fascinating because this isn’t just a simple asset rotation.

I think this is more that they have to be able to dump some of their pipeline in order to have some cash on hand to cover operations of existing assets as well as eventually reinvest in their pipeline. But this, normally when you do an asset rotation, you either sell off a small percentage minority stake in your asset portfolio, or you take, some of your projects and sell them off.

This is a fairly large deal for a good chunk of capacity that, Contour Global is is going to have as part of their portfolio now, bolstering what KKR’s doing with their backing as well. KKR wants Contour Global to start expanding more and it’s put them On the hunt for, asset acquisitions like this.

So, it’s a good fit, but it’s an interesting move from Greenergy at this point to really start getting some more cash in the door.

Joel Saxum: Aside from the sale here, we’re talking, M& A here in Newsflash. I want to focus on this Grenergy’s asset rotation target. So they’re looking at, they have a target for 2026 and ensures funding for a 2.

6 billion euro strategic plan. That strategic plan is to become a world leader in energy storage, which, I mean, if you’ve been following anything that we talk about on the podcast, in the last few years, energy storage has become a very important part

Allen Hall: A consortium led by APG Asset Management NV and Australian Retirement Trust will acquire Riverstone Holdings LLC equity stake in Pattern Energy. Now, Pattern Energy is currently developing over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy and transmission projects for nearly 10, 000 megawatts across North America, either operating or under construction.

Phil, Pattern Energy is a privately held company up to this point, but they are seeking a little bit of money to help with these projects that they have going on, Sunzea being one of them.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, absolutely. And the fact that Riverstone Holdings is selling out their stake. They were one of the founding partners along with management for Pattern.

It’s a big signal for Pattern to be able to take a next step in terms of their growth plan. But also a big deal where, these two pension companies are investment and an investment fund is coming in alongside the Canadian pension plan investment board that also owns a stake along with the pattern management.

So, all of that combined means a lot more. kind of, retirement money and pension money going into, renewable project development, which whether it’s been through direct investment or in this case, like this deal, the equity stake in pattern you’re seeing, we’ve talked about.

On the show before, there’s a lot more investments coming in from insurance companies, pension plan companies and those type of management companies and investment vehicles. So this is kind of furthering that through, in this case, again, an equity stake as opposed to direct investment in projects, but it’s a, really good deal for Pattern, who, has continued to kind of outperform a lot of their industry peers especially when it comes to being able to raise capital.

Joel Saxum: When you talk about an Australian retirement trust getting involved in this, what I see is long term investment being excited about. wind and renewable projects, but short term we want to make money type of investments not being as interested. So you can see that like the black rocks are involved in the Canadian pension funds are involved.

These are very long term stable investments in these infrastructure projects, but the people that want to make money quick are getting out of renewables. So see that as a trend.

Allen Hall: Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has acquired a majority stake in Toqlukuti’k Wind and Hydrogen, a large scale project in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, from ABO Energy.

The project is expected to produce competitive green hydrogen and ammonia, leveraging exceptional wind resources and existing infrastructure. Now that project will create over 4, 000 construction jobs and 400, 000 jobs.

And Phil, is this the first Green Hydrogen and Ammonia project for CIP?

Philip Totaro: It is for CIP which is kind of an interesting move. We’ve talked before on both the Uptime Wind Energy podcast and Newsflash here about Whether or not we need, tons and tons of hydrogen, this project has the potential to be upwards of five gigawatts of wind or other power generation that would feed into, this hydrogen and ammonia production.

Whether or not they’re going to actually build it that big, we don’t know yet because this is still in a fairly early stage of development, so it gives CIP a good opportunity to get in on the ground floor or something. We’ll see how this goes. Canada does seem very enthusiastic about the hydrogen projects though, because they have Well, except for the locals, I guess, but Canada in general, the Canadian government certainly And the provincial governments are a lot more excited about getting some of these projects built.

So I think they will welcome CIP’s acquisition and we’ll see where projects like this go in the future.

Joel Saxum: Newfoundland and Labrador have some of the best wind resources in North America. So that’s a thing, right? But the other side of it is the energy mix in Newfoundland and Labrador is very heavily renewables already.

There’s a lot of hydro. They’re flush with renewable generation. So adding these on is of course going to go secondary market, hydrogen, ammonia. But the big thing here for the locals is 4, 000 construction jobs, 400 long term operational positions. Jobs and good paying jobs are scarce in that corner of the world, so this will be a great boom for the economy up in the Maritimes in Canada.